That Night We Were Ravenous

A beautiful new edition of the award-winning collection from Canada’s new Poet Laureate. Newfoundland-born poet John Steffler is one of this country’s most accomplished writers. Recently named Canada’s national poet, he is the author of The Grey Islands (poems) and the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, both of which have become classics in our time. That Night We Were Ravenous is Steffler’s most recent book of new poetry. In this extraordinary gathering of poems, he follows the trajectory of some of his earlier work with poems situated in Newfoundland’s coves, on trails, and in communities that testify to the pure bite and edge of this terrain. Other poems in the later sections of the book, more intimate, are set in Southern Ontario and Greece. This is poetry that captures the imagination and activates the heart. Simply by looking through Steffler’s eyes, we come away with an enlarged sense of the natural world on the one hand, and of our own humanity on the other.

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada's former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. The Grey Islands is the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty. Bent, I circle the building grubbing and rooting. Every shingle and stick I lift yields bait. Things Carm ate and didn't eat, turned to worms. A kind of organic shadow of the man. - from The Grey Islands Praise for The Grey Islands: [The book] illustrates? how the outsider becomes an insider by becoming a supplicant, renouncing the role of saviour and honouring the culture of the people among whom he has decided to make his home. - Adrian Fowler, from the Introduction.

A former Poet Laureate of Canada and finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize returns with a wide-ranging new collection of poems. CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 In John Steffler's luminous collection, And Yet, dreams, memory and desire are forms of wilderness that burst into our daily lives, inspiring us to see ourselves and the world anew. Exuberant, powerful, even prescient, the poems confront the unknown and unexpected around and within us and call up our impulse to resist certainty and finality. The flimsiest shelter might seem best; a trail guide's house is revealed as a forest beyond names. What is outside might be most desired; a suit of clothes gazing into a mirror longs to become an iguana. In the title poem, a road-weary traveller comes in sight of the longed-for home--yet at the last minute turns away. Restless in their own language, the poems muster the impact of direct sensory experience and remind us what it means to live closer to the physical world. At times their attenuated forms acquire the anxious beauty of Giacometti sculptures. Our capacity for surprising change, these poems suggest, is both a cause for caution and a reason to hope that we can reinvent ourselves and transform our destructive technological culture.

A startling debut volume, the latest in Chris Abani's Black Goat Poetry Series.

Keira, hired as Blighty Graveyard's new groundskeeper, lives surrounded by the dead. They watch her through the fog. They wordlessly cry out. They've been desperately waiting for help moving on―and only Keira can hear them. But not every restless spirit wants to be saved. Sometimes the dead hate the living too much to find peace. As Keira struggles to uncover the tangled histories of some of the graveyard's oldest denizens, danger seeps from the darkest edges of the forest. A vicious serial killer was interred among the trees decades before, his spirit twisted by his violent nature. He's furious. Ravenous. And when Keira unwittingly answers his call, she may just seal her fate as his final intended victim.

A valuable and entertaining account of three young Englishmen who emigrated to Texas. The book consists of letters written home between 1878 and 1883. The three boys bought an 800 acre ranch near Boerne, and by 1883 had a successful sheep, cattle and horse ranch. The work, edited by their father, was written in part to encourage the second and third sons of English gentlemen, impoverished by a want of opportunity in England to emigrate to America.

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist In this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language. Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon. A comprehensive guided tour that is lively and always accessible, Lives of the Poets illuminates our most transcendent literary tradition.

Set in the future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime.